Cognitive Psychology: Impulsive Decision Making and Choice Blindness

摘要

Psychology is a discipline that lies outside the borders of the traditional sciences. As the area of ‘cognitive science’ gathers strength, the borders that separate psychology and the sciences are beginning to become porous and permeable. Indeed, over the past half a century or more the blurring of boundaries, between the ‘hard’ physical and natural sciences on the one hand and the ‘softer’ social sciences on the other, has been most evident in economics, which has rapidly succumbed to the advance of mathematics, statistics and, at times, physics (or more accurately, physicists). It has become possible to hold mathematical modellers responsible for the woes of investment banks and other financial institutions in a turbulent economy. Even biology, with ideas dating back to Darwin, finds a place in the discourse of economics, which shares a very large border with the sciences. A subdiscipline, behavioural economics, is an area where psychology and cognitive science begin to intrude. Researchers who attempt to understand the processes of decision making need to cross and recross the borders between various disciplines with great facility.